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Considering that the report was a complete Elon Musk worshiping puff piece, I doubt Tesla will complain too much. I half expected it to end with Steve Kroft asking for a towel to clean the spooge off his face.

Have you been in one? Man, they are beautiful, fun as hell to drive, great acceleration.I wish I could afford one.I didn't see the 60 minutes piece, but I can't think of anything practical to complain about.

Having driven one extensively, it is kinda fun, but not in the sense that a Porsche Cayman is fun. It goes very fast off the line, but it is hard to hide its rather ample weight. Same deal with the Tesla Roadster too, having owned the chassis mate Lotus Exige for several years, the experiences weren't comparable.

LOL. Yeah, the Model S is superior to the MB S-class W222 4-door that still costs more. The base on the S-class is 95K. The upper end of the Model S is 100K. And the base of W222 is very spartan and more like a GM or a VW. The Model S is faster, holds more ppl and cargo, has cheap re-fuels, and if you are in a real hurry to fill up, you will, within a year, be able to swap the battery out for one that holds enough power to run you 450+ MPC.

The Tesla S isn't a luxury sedan, please don't compare it to a Mercedes S-class, which is about the same price when both are nicely equipped.

Having sat in both (I used to own a Mercedes) I can assure you that the Tesla S most definitely IS a luxury sedan. There is nothing in Mercedes lineup under $100K that I think is more fitting of the definition.

The supercharger network doesn't make up for the fact that you can refuel that S-class in 5 minutes and drive it 500 miles on that 5 minute "charge".

Tesla Valet ServiceTesla is putting in place a valet service, so that your car is seamlessly picked up and replaced with a loaner and then returned as soon as we are done. There is no additional charge for this.

Tesla Rangers Come to YouTesla Rangers are service technicians who make house calls. For an additional fee, they can come to your home or office to perform most maintenance and warranty repairs.

The object of a carpool lane is to make more effective use of tax dollars. By encouraging people to carpool, we need to spend less on road construction. But if rich people pay an additional tax to use the car pool lane, then they are paying their share of the cost of that lane. It is no worse than rich people using their money to buy anything else.

If it would be Europe, they would explain it as "reducing greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time recovering some of the taxpayer's money that went into road construction". But since this is the USA, we can't slap taxes onto undesirable things because that's "socialism". Don't ask me why. It always puzzled me that they banned a lot of popular incandescent light bulbs, rather than slapping a tax onto them and investing the income in renewable energy. The bulbs would die out effectively, but you'd get to keep the infrastructure improvements. Slightly more on-topic, there are the plans to ban vehicles that don't meat certain fuel-efficiency standards. Why not leave people the Freedom (Which Is More Important Than Anything Else In Life) to buy them but simply tax them? Or much fairer and easier to implement, tax the fuel itself, or at least stop sponsoring it through tax breaks for the oil companies. Assuming the price increases are not too unreasonable and are ramped up gradually enough, The Market (In Which We Trust) will find its own way towards more fuel-efficient vehicles, with built-in exemptions for The Rich (Whose Privileges Shall Not Be Touched) who can afford to pay more in tax. But no, I live in confusion and ignorance. Freedom, especially for The Rich, and faith in The Market are all marks of The Devil, and its name is Socialism.

But I sorely digress. This thread being about the USA, yeah, your "make more effective use of tax dollars" sounds about right.

Allowing EVs or LEVs (low emissions vehicles - e.g. a Prius) into the carpool lane solo becomes more problematic when the freeways have more lanes, like in California.

Most places I've driven which have HOV lanes (as they're called outside of California) have 1 HOV lane to 2 or 3 regular lanes. That means as long as fewer than 33% or 25% of the cars on the road have 2+ occupants, there is an advantage to using the HOV lane. Once you exceed those thresholds, there are as many cars using the HOV lanes as

Because these lanes have not just one purpose, but several. Taxis are a part of public transport. They make it more possible for people to use trains, planes and busses for the major part of their journey, and then a taxi to fill in the missing last part of the journey. And they reduce the pressure on car parks and road side parking spaces that would otherwise be there if people drove their own car. That's why they are encouraged.

Yeah I hate seeing stories of massive success, in progress. If there is anything we don't need right now with all the economic uncertainty and political strife, its a positive story showing that greatness* can still be achieved/snark. Despite conventional wisdom, a story can be complementary and objective at the same time.

*Yes, turning two "crazy" ideas into $billion companies in 10 years with most of the population doubting, if not openly thwarting you, is a great achievement.

At least they didn't fraudulently claim the battery went flat during a test run.

Can you link to the clip/transcript of the scene where this alleged fraudulent claim occurred? Because I remember watching that episode, and aside from (what I perceived as) the playful "if the battery dies, you'll be doing this" pushing scene toward the end, I don't recall them saying or doing anything that would qualify as fraudulent. The fact that Tesla's lawsuit against the show was settled in a way that still allows the BBC to rebroadcast the episode seems to indicate a lack of fraudulent claims.

Also, in fairness, there's no denying that a "fuse issue" caused the brakes to fail during the Stig's test run - Even Tesla admits that one.

Did you see the episode? It was, another, excuse to bash on all things American*. The presented t as if it ran out of charge. They really tried to hide the fact that they were not driving the car under normal road conditions.Clarkson also has a long history of attacking electric cars, and when he is presented with argument, he responds with non sequitors.I like how the article you linked only links to itself and not to any actual reference to the court case.

*sometime justifiable, but all too often I've seen them do things to American car they don't do to non American cars.

Did you see the episode? It was, another, excuse to bash on all things American*. The presented t as if it ran out of charge. They really tried to hide the fact that they were not driving the car under normal road conditions.Clarkson also has a long history of attacking electric cars, and when he is presented with argument, he responds with non sequitors.I like how the article you linked only links to itself and not to any actual reference to the court case.

*sometime justifiable, but all too often I've seen them do things to American car they don't do to non American cars.

Top Gear is Cartainment... In my opinion, it isn't a serious car show. Though, it is popular... Those who watch it understand that the hosts have their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks and that they drive cars hard, not like normal people in day-to-day traffic. Saying that a show is disingenuous because it doesn't represent daily driving habits is a specious argument simply because it isn't that type of show.

The point is that Top Gear isn't a show for people to find information on daily driving. That's what Motor Week and Consumer Reports are for....

true and clarkson had a GT40 for a while. They do complain about some american cans not being able to go around corners safely because of the "barn door engineering", they love the power of the V8s but not the handling due to real old school technology suspension etc.

Every professional editor in the world would add engine noise to a shot of an operating automobile. It's one of those things that you do without even thinking about, because generally you will receive footage (especially if it's b-roll) that has poor audio quality. The editor probably dropped it in like he/she would always do, without stopping to think "hey, that's an electric car, so that silence i'm hearing in the footage SHOULD be there." I would most certainly consider that an editing error.

I would hope that an editor for a NEWS SERVICE would have more sense than that. Altering levels, filtering noises, tweaking, balancing yes, but going to a library of sound effects and overlaying foreign audio and sound effects? I would hope they would only do that under orders from above.

The GP said "editor" but it's likely to be a generic sound guy who works on numerous projects. Never worked in the industry, but based upon simple observation I think they pretty much work from a library of standard sounds that they add to everything by default.

It's the (computer) mice clicks that always get me. Anyone actually have a mouse that loudly clunks in the way shown on virtually every television show, news show, etc? Even better when the visuals show they're using a laptop's touchpad...

It's the (computer) mice clicks that always get me. Anyone actually have a mouse that loudly clunks in the way shown on virtually every television show, news show, etc?

Any full-size optical mouse based on microswitches will be fairly loud because the empty space inside the mouse's chassis acts as a resonator. This is true of the HP MODGUO mouse on my work computer, and it's true of the Acer mouse that I use at home to play Cookie Clicker.

If you are over a couple of hundred feet away from the explosion there will be a difference that you can perceive. You know that sound and light travel at different speeds, right?

If you want a fun demonstration of this get a day on an EOD range, you see the explosion, then hear the explosion, then feel the blast wave, then feel the ground rumble all with different time lag from the actual explosion. Really cool.

But, the point is, that it's wrong. It's always a fraud on the viewer, even if sometimes it's a small fraud on the viewer. What we are basically saying now is that "it's always a lie, but this time, it's an obvious lie, and so we are sorry".

The process of dubbing in audio, which we know happens frequently, is the problem. It's always a lie.

The answer should be "no more lies". In this case, it's always been a pet peeve. The video shows a middle-aged guy accelerating normally down a city street at 20 or 30 mph. The audio is of an engine hitting redline after slipping the clutch.

Well, even with shotgun mics, there is a bit of noise cancellation due to the design. This is why when you see mics on booms, they're typically pointed *down* at the ground as they have a cardoid pick-up pattern. The ground typically doesn't have a lot of sound coming from it, but the truck behind what you're recording does. Now, with ENG style recording, the microphones are typically pointed directly at the reporter, which also has the unfortunate effect of picking up everything behind the subject, too. In real world under ideal circumstances, there's a mixer who can blend/adjust the output of the lav/handheld mic and the camera mic to produce the "best" sound, but for small productions this isn't always possible.

This is just scratching the surface on the kind of deception [youtube.com] that frequently passes for "journalism" in the modern age. With a bit of clever editing, you can make anyone "say" virtually anything you want.

Every professional editor in the world would add engine noise to a shot of an operating automobile. It's one of those things that you do without even thinking about, because generally you will receive footage (especially if it's b-roll) that has poor audio quality.

I am a motion picture sound designer, my credits include [imdb.com] Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker and Men in Black 3.

I would not add fucking internal combustion engine noise to footage of a Tesla S. I might add something-- an electric motor, or recording of a prius, something designed special; I'd definitely add tire skids and suspension sounds over bumps. But I'd be laughed off the dubbing stage if I added V-8 revs to and electric car.

Sound design is one of the few aspects of television news where reporters and editors are allowed to straight-up lie, because they have a mentality that all they're required to do is (1) not modify the image, and (2) not say anything false. All other manipulations are considered merely style.

I like this comment. I'm reminded of a recent interview that Neil Degrasse-Tyson did with the director of several big blockbusters. Neil called him out on a shot where there was a big lightning storm on the horizon and the sound of the thunder was coincident with the lightning in the distance. The director laughed and said he originally cut it with the real sound and the long delay was off-putting, despite being accurate. Apparently the accurate sound pulled you right out of the movie (because the delay was like 7-8 seconds).

Interesting that "real" sometimes doesn't help tell the story, and it can even hinder it.

This is true. And even if they did know it was electric, they may not know what an electric car sounds like. Until my wife bought a Prius, I had no idea myself; I had never been near enough to a running electric vehicle to hear their sounds.

Errors are sometimes purposeful. In this case, probably the editing team were used to dubbing appropriate background noise on footage of cars, because the sound of a distant vehicle would tend to be inaudible.

Smooth, instant acceleration no matter what your current speed. It's mind blowing when you first experience it.

I don't get how people can "miss" the sound of a regular engine, and having to shift. A good computer analogy would be "missing" having to manually input bootstrap code to get your machine going. Sure, it can be a nice bit of nostalgia, but it's a requirement of antiquated technology that no longer applies in the case of the Model S.

I so wish I could afford that car. I hope they can get the price of its successor down into the 30s; I will jump on that SO quick.

Shifting is a lot of fun, even in a little economy car. Even more so in a nice sports car.

Having driven a Tesla Roadster.... the "instant-on" acceleration of the Tesla is even more fun. It makes you giggle like a little kid. The acceleration is so instantaneous that it is startling the first time.

To go with it there is also a weird bit of instant-off deceleration to contend with as well, at least in the Roadster. Simply lifting your foot results in a fairly hard braking force from the electric engine.

A friend of mine just bought a Tesla. As far as I know it maybe the only one in the St. Louis area. I recently bought a Chevy Volt. We were at an event and the topic came up. One of the people there asked me why I went with the volt. And the answer was fairly simple:

My wife's commute is 15 miles round trip a day. Maybe 20 if she does some afterwork shopping. So the vast majority of the time it's running on electric. But my Dad lives ~ 70 mile round trip from us. He's older and I'm usually out there once a week to check up on him or help him clean out gutters or whatever needs to be done around his house. I have farms that are 300 mile round trip that need seen after. That is certainly a problem with a Tesla.

Also my budget for a new car was between $25,000 - $30,000. With lower base price for 2014, tax credits, and GM card earnings the Volt fit in the price range and was a little bit smaller of a car than the Malibu Eco, which meant it fit in the garage better. (I really wish we had a 3 car garage, but...)

Finally, there are a dozen Chevy and GM dealers around the city. I'm not even sure there is somewhere here that can do work on a Tesla.

Who really killed the EV? It was the "consumer" who was beating down the manufacturer's door for an EV but never put down their cash when the manufacturer delivered on that demand.

Tesla is, in fact, a highly profitable company. They paid off their $465 million Department of Energy loan [businessweek.com] nine years early. So the rest of your rant is irrelevant. Tesla is profitably making electric vehicles that actual customers are buying. And they already have designs coming up that will be considerably less expensive than the Model S, and will almost certainly see much higher sales figures as a result.

Hi. I'm an audio engineer. I've done several short films, nominated for a few awards. You just called me a moron, because you don't understand what I do.

Frankly, my dear, nobody gives a damn about what a particular car sounds like in a particular situation except for us nerds. Unless the media piece is explicitly focused on how something sounds, having realistic audio is actually distracting to the audience. There are thousands of little noises that our brains filter out because we don't care about them. Someone walks down an alley in a city at night, and their ears will pick up rustling clothes, a jingling zipper pull, creaking pipes, whistling wind, noisy cars, buzzing fans, someone shouting a block away, et cetera. Of course they'll hear their own footsteps, but that's the only thing they'll notice. A good audio engineer will strip out the soundtrack completely, add a noise floor to match the rest of the production, and dub in footsteps. Leaving in the raw audio will also leave in those background noises, but because the audience hasn't been exposed to them, the background noises stand out more, distracting the viewer from the film's actual subject.

Having tires squeal on gravel is similar. Rather than background noise, the distracting element is that the sound just isn't what's expected. In an action shot, there usually isn't time to properly establish the scenery.

Consider a scene where the Dukes are waiting by the side of the road, and leave in a hurry. They hop in their car, step on the gas, and rush off from a standstill. Sure, visually you can see it's a soft shoulder, but audibly, your brain hasn't bothered to think about dirt or gravel noises. The first sound most audiences associate with a fast departure like that is a squealing tire. That's what they expect, so having the more realistic grinding noise will raise a different cue in the audience's mind. They'll wonder briefly why the engine is grinding, and worry whether something bad happened to the General Lee.

In another scene, the boys have pulled head-in to a parking space. After the iconic hood-slide, they have to back out on the gravel before they can take off. That's a chance for the audio engineer to put in a slow gravel noise, hinting to the audience that they should expect to hear gravel. By the time the car accelerates, the audio scene has been established in the listeners' minds. A fast gravel grind may be acceptable, but the squeal is still less likely to distract.

The professional audio technique, and similar techniques on the visual medium, are a major reason behind the perceived quality difference between professional films and home movies. Subtle echoes, timing, and the selection of noises all contribute to keeping the audience focused in the direction the director wants. Blame him if something bothers you.

I'm an audio engineer. I've done several short films, nominated for a few awards

Nice to meet you and congratulations.

Frankly, my dear, nobody gives a damn about what a particular car sounds like in a particular situation except for us nerds.

Probably true which brings up the question why bother going to the trouble of adding the wrong sound? To bring things back on topic, this isn't a fictional movie like star wars where the fact that there is no sound in space isn't important. This is a news piece or at least purports to be one. Accuracy matters in non-fiction. If you can't record what it does accurately then don't record the audio.

Unless the media piece is explicitly focused on how something sounds, having realistic audio is actually distracting to the audience,

Much like 24FPS shooting (and no, HFR doesn't look like a "home movie" to me, it looks like it was done with technology from this century rather than people being too cheap to replace cameras from the 50s), the time for that kind of bullshit has passed. It is passé, it insults the intelligence of the viewers, and if you tell us we're supposed to like it we will cheerfully *and accurately* insult your intelligence too!

You're not supposed to like it, and you're not supposed to dislike it. You're supposed to not even notice it at all, because the product should perfectly match your expectations. That your expectations are in the minority does not make such efforts "bullshit", and your easily-insulted intelligence does not have any bearing on my own.

Most folks watch a movie to see an entertaining movie, not to get the perfect auditory experience of a 1967 Chevy rolling over limestone gravel on a clear summer day in Illinois

Related to this topic, although I have no desire to question your experience or how you are doing your job, is the question "have you noticed movie audiences get smarter over the years in regards to the movie watching experience, specifically in regards to sound?"

The easiest visual example of movie audiences getting smarter is wanting better and better special effects. For those times humans are the VFX, the uncanny valley is a known problem - that still today VFX houses have problems overcoming.

Consider a scene where the Dukes are waiting by the side of the road, and leave in a hurry. They hop in their car, step on the gas, and rush off from a standstill. Sure, visually you can see it's a soft shoulder, but audibly, your brain hasn't bothered to think about dirt or gravel noises. The first sound most audiences associate with a fast departure like that is a squealing tire.

This has actually been pointed out by everyone I know, including my kids. You're the only ones who think that we don't all notice and think it's totally wrong. Hence, you are a moron.

I will also comment that this (editors are morons!) is quite frankly, insulting. I'm currently a film student and the difference in a good film and a really shitty film many times comes down to the AUDIO. The things you and I take for granted dont' quite work that well in film. Capturing different levels of background noise. An errant door slam down the street creeps into the audio, right where you're trying to do a vantage cut now gets cut off, or some constant hum of a refrigerator that's on and now t

This, combined with something I saw in a parking lot yesterday make me think again about electric cars.
I saw a guy text-walking in a parking lot, he nearly hit by a prius which was in low speed electric mode. (yeah that is a user problem, but the guy wouldn't have walked in front of a glass-packed V8 mustang.)

People expect cars to make noise. Television is a decent example since it just happened, but in real life, cars make noise, which warns peds, motorcycles, bicyclists, and other cars that there is 2 tons of metal, plastic, and rubber about to hit them.

Nearly silent, high performance cars remove one of the basest instinct protections we have against current squids driving fast cars (they are loud, so you know they are doing something stupid even before you see them). I imagine some detroit dinosaur who owns a few dozen politicians could latch on to this and require electrics to make some kind of noise.. which will be pretty funny once the hacker/teenager crowd starts modding them.

Mine will probably play Yakkety Sax until I get a DMCA takedown notice,

That's actually something that's happening. [wikipedia.org] Apparently it's quite an interesting design challenge: you don't have to make it sound exactly like an automobile, so there's room to produce a "better" sound. One that provides more directional cues, maybe, or carries more consistent information on vehicle speed, or which is subtly distinguishable for each car so that you can better understand a busy street.

Thanks but no thanks. The one chance we have to remove noise pollution from our roads, and then we have threats it'll come back. The *invisible* damage to all our minds caused by noise pollution in busy towns and streets is worth FAR more in cost than the cost of a few accidents and even lives. People will adapt - they will learn to look where they're going instead of just blindly texting and paying no attention to the road.

Also remember that with towns much quieter (due to no ICE noises), we can hear ti

It's not only for Tesla, and not just on videos either.Engines are getting more efficient and quieter every year, and cars are better insulated as well. Customers are disappointed when they spend big bucks on a car only to find out it doesn't sound like a big old sport car.The solution? Manufacturers actually add speakers next to the engine, exhaust and inside the car.You sometimes get V8 sound out of a V6 car:)

Obviously the only reasonable solution is to legally mandate that electric car manufacturers put proximity sensors on all their vehicles, that triggers when a pedestrian is within X feet, and plays "Dixie" on the car horn at about 165 db.

The mental image of a sleek, shiny new Tesla blasting that cheesy tune as it rolls up to a crosswalk... priceless.

CVT doesn't have gears. Instead, it smoothly "shifts" by making its pulleys wider or narrower. The angled gap that the belt rides on thus gets bigger or smaller, which takes the place of having separate gears.

"A continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a transmission that can change seamlessly through an infinite number of effective gear ratios between maximum and minimum values. This contrasts with other mechanical transmissions that offer a fixed number of gear ratios. The flexibility of a CVT allows the input shaft to maintain a constant angular velocity." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmission [wikipedia.org]

My 2012 Toyota iQ [wikipedia.org] 1.33 has one, and it's the smoothest ride you could ask for. A

Electric trains can make noises which sound a lot like a gear change as they change speed. In reality it is changes to the electric control regime.
It's still not reasonable to assume that a Tesla will sound the same though.

Actually there are valid reasons for an electric vehicle to shift gears - just because many electric vehicles only have one gear doesn't mean there aren't valid reasons for having multiple gear ratios.

Although in the case of EVs, shifting tends to be more speed-dependent than load-dependent. While EV motors are typically constant-power, there ARE torque limits at low speeds due to current limits. Although this usually means that an EV that has more than one gear ratio needs far fewer than an internal combustion vehicle. (as in, even two gear ratios is usually enough in the rare cases where only one gear ratio wasn't.)

They do that for safety too, not just to appease the driver. Domino's Pizza in the Netherlands made a marketing coup with this a few years ago when they switched to electric delivery scooters. They added audio of a guy going "VROOoooooommmmmm! Lecker-lecker-lecker... Vrrrooooommmm!" [youtube.com] (Apparently, "lecker" means "yummy" in Dutch.)

invent some better ways to store more energy

There have been MANY teams working on this, for several years, with lots of VC/R&D, and several new products are going to hit the market it the next couple of years: liquid metal [ambri.com]